The season to reward storytellers

While the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2019 announced its longlist in the Capital, the JCB Prize for Literature 2019 came up with a shortlist.

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Smitha Verma

October 20, 2019

UPDATED: October 20, 2019 10:59 IST

A selection of some of the books in the running for the JCB Prize.

It’s the season when writers are being felicitated for their work. While the Nobel Prize for Literature hit the headlines last week, two of the most coveted literary prizes in the subcontinent made news recently. While the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2019 announced its longlist in the Capital, the JCB Prize for Literature 2019 came up with a shortlist. Both celebrate the finest in writing and feature some of the big names from across the country.

"We look for what any educated reader with a certain degree of emotional maturity and reading experience would look for," says Harish Trivedi, Chair of the DSC Prize Jury 2019. The five-jury members located in five different countries for the DSC Prize had to engage with each other in a collaborative process before they arrived at their longlist of 15 novels.

Billed as the country’s richest literary prize, JCB is looking to felicitate the best in Indian writing. On the other hand, DSC (global infrastructure group) looks at the best on offer from South Asia. For a writer both these awards are coveted and for a reader the list is what makes their must-read books for the year. According to writer Rana Dasgupta, literary director of JCB Prize, the award besides hailing contemporary writers from the country, looks at enhancing the visibility of contemporary Indian literature around the world. This year’s shortlist includes Ib’s Endless Search for Satisfaction by Roshan Ali, My Father’s Garden by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar and The Far Fieldby Madhuri Vijay. The shortlist includes two translations There’s Gunpowder in the Air by Manoranjan Byapari, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha and Trial by Silence and Lonely Harvest by Perumal Murugan translated from Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan.

"Each year, our jury has to identify the greatest novels of the year. So it is sheer coincidence that our shortlist this year is so powerfully diverse. Originally written in three different languages, each of these five entries immerses us in a very different part of the Indian reality," says Dasgupta. The shortlisted authors of JCB will receive Rs 1 lakh and for translation, then along with the author, the translator will be awarded an additional Rs 50,000. The winner, to be announced in November, will receive prize money of Rs 25 lakh (for a translated work, the translator gets an additional Rs 10 lakh).

The DSC Prize, into its ninth year, received a record 90 eligible entries this year from 42 publishers and 55 imprints from across the globe. "The money at $25,000 is not bad, especially for young debutantes and those who live by their writing," says Trivedi.

The longlisted entries for DSC include Akil Kumarasamy Half Gods, Amitabha Bagchi’s Half the Night is Gone, Devi S. Laskar’s The Atlas of Reds and Blues, Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways. The longlist includes 99 Nights in Logar by Jamil Jan Kochai, The Far Field, There’s Gunpowder in the Air, Mirza Waheed’s Tell Her Everything, Nadeem Zaman’s In the Time of the Others, Perumal Murugan’s A Lonely Harvest and Rajkamal Jha’s The City and the Sea. Others in the reckoning are Sadia Abbas Shubhangi Swarup, TD Ramakrishnan and Tova Reich.